Yewande.base.eth@LionessAtEase
This is true globally, but for Africa, IRL was never a trend. It has always been the only channel that actually worked. Let me explain why, and why crypto teams in emerging markets need to pay good attention to this if we are serious about the kind of scaling we keep talking about.
Trust in Africa doesn’t travel though screens the way it does in the West. It travels through rooms, faces, handshakes, someone you know vouching for someone they know.
To an African man, out of sight is out of mind. Before he can put his money, energy and reputation into something, he needs someone he believes he can always hold when things go wrong. This is not a loop a webinar can close or some random ad that pops up while he is scrolling facebook timeline. A physical room/interaction does.
This is not a digital adoption gap. This is just how trust has always moved over here.
I have been running hackathons, founder programs, and street onboarding sessions across Southwest Nigeria for 2 years+ and the pattern has been consistent.
A product could have zero digital presence and still onboard 50+ real, recurring users from a single afternoon session — because the right person showed up, got it, and told their network.
The working examples are right in front of us. I am talking abut the current Fintech and banking giants we have in Nigeria today. Moniepoint, Palmpay, etc. They did not win on digital spend alone. They won because someone showed up in a room somewhere and made a person test it.
I frown when people call it word-of-mouth because that is not really it. It is TRUST TRANSFER AT SCALE.
This is why IRL isn’t just a marketing tactic in emerging markets. It is a distribution moat.
An African founder who builds real community. Shows up, educates in person, and earns trust on-ground is buidling something that a well-funded competitor with only digital spend cannot easily replicate.
Presence, or as we call it on CT SHOWING UP, compounds, Ads do not.
The teams that understand this are quietly winning. They are not at every crypto-native conference. They are in Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, Jakarta. They are in rooms that don’t get tweeted about, with users that don’t show up in your typical growth dashboards. They are building retention no amount of token incentives can buy.
One thing worth separating clearly though, is that “distribution is not translation”. You can put groups of 10–20 people together as field distribution agents and reps but if you don't understand translation, you are not different from a crypto airdrop project. A product with mediocre UX, adopted inside a single WhatsApp community by the right connector, will outlast a beautiful app with zero cultural footing. That is translation.
Before the end of the week, I will put out a post on translation — what it actually means and how to get it right.
But yes — IRL is having a moment globally for crypto marketing. But in Africa? It never left.
The founders who knew this have been quietly compounding.
